Dark Rivers of the Heart

buried between the two arroyos, the intervening land might indeed be washed away and the entire plain recontoured, depending on how long the storm raged at its current intensity.
        The impossibly heavy downfall abruptly grew heavier still.
        He sprinted for the Explorer, clambered inside, and pulled his door shut. Shivering, streaming water, he backed the truck farther from the northern arroyo, afraid that the wheels would be undermined.
        With head still downcast, from under his lowered brow, Rocky looked up worriedly at his master.
        "Have to drive between arroyos, east or west," Spencer thought aloud,
        "while there's still something to drive on."
        The windshield wipers weren't coping well with the cascades that poured across the glass, and the rain-blurred landscape settled into deeper degrees of false twilight. He tried turning the wiper control to a higher setting. It was already as high as it would go.
        "Shouldn't head toward lower land. Water's gaining velocity as it goes.
        More likely to wash out down there."
        He switched the headlamps to high beams. The extra light didn't clarify anything: It bounced off the skeins of rain, so the way ahead seemed to be obscured by curtain after curtain of mirrored beads. He selected the low beams again.
        "Safer ground uphill. Ought to be more rock."
        The dog only trembled.
        "The space between arroyos will probably widen out."
        Spencer shifted gears again. The plan sloped gradually up to the west, into obscure terrain.
        As giant needles of lightning stitched the heavens to the earth, he drove into the resultant narrow pocket of gloom.
        At Roy Miro's direction, agents in San Francisco were seeking Ethel and (.eor e Porth the maternal rand arents who had raised Spencer ('brant following the death of his mother. Meanwhile, Roy drove to the offices of Dr. Nero Mondello in Beverly Hills.
        Mondello was the most prominent plastic surgeon in a community where God's work was revised more frequently than anywhere except Palm Springs and Palm Beach. On a misshapen nose, he could perform miracles equivalent to those that Michelangelo had performed on giant cubes of Carrara marble-though Mondello's fees were substantially higher than those of the Italian master.
        He had agreed to make changes in a busy schedule to meet with Roy, because he believed that he was assisting the FBI in a desperate search for a particularly savage serial killer.
        They met in the doctor's spacious inner office: white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, white shell sconces. Two abstract paintings hung in white frames: The only color was white, and the artist achieved his effects solely with the textures of the heavily layered pigment. Two whitewashed lacewood chairs with white leather cushions flanked a glass-and-steel table and stood before a whitewashed hurled-wood desk, against a backdrop of white silk draperies.
        Roy sat in one of the lacewood chairs, like a blot of soil in all that whiteness, and wondered what view would be revealed if the draperies were opened. He had the crazy notion that beyond the window, in downtown Beverly Hills, lay a landscape swaddled in snow.
        Other than the photographs of Spencer Grant that Roy had brought with him, the only object on the polished surface of the desk was a single blood-red rose in a Waterford cut-crystal vase. The flower was a testament to the possibility of perfection-and drew the visitor's attention to the man who sat beyond it, behind the desk.
        Tall, slender, handsome, fortyish, Dr. Nero Mondello was the focal point of his bleached domain. With his thick jet-black hair combed back from his forehead, warm-toned olive complexion, and eyes the precise purple-black of ripe plums, the surgeon had an impact almost as powerful as that of a spirit manifestation. He wore a white lab coat over a white shirt and red silk necktie. Around the face of his gold Rolex, matched diamonds sparkled as though charged with supernatural energy.
        The room and the man were no less impressive for being blatantly theatrical. Mondello was in the business of replacing nature's truth with convincing illusions, and all good magicians were theatrical.
        Studying the DMV photograph of Grant and the computer-generated portrait, Mondello said, "Yes, this would have been a dreadful wound, quite